Death, Dissection and the Destitute

In 1817, Mary Shelley first thought of the story that would become “Frankenstein,” in which the eponymous doctor uses corpses to reanimate a dead man. And even as she wrote this classic, resurrection men across Britain were stealing dead bodies to sell to medical schools, which were legally permitted to use only the bodies of executed murderers for the study of anatomy. There weren’t that many murderers, and demand outstripped supply. The Anatomy Act of 1832 was intended to suppress the trade that resulted by legalizing the anatomization of the body of anyone who had died without being able to afford funeral expenses, but in so doing, it criminalized the poor merely for being poor. Ruth Richardson’s pioneering study of the Act, show more those who created it, and those who fought it, ranges from the “cholera riots” that broke out as the first great epidemic swept across the country to the political upheavals that produced the Reform Act, which some historians consider to be the start of modern democracy in Britain. Connecting all this disparate information creates a book that, in analyzing how a society treated its dead, shows us how it treated its living. show less

A wonderful book that thoroughly takes apart a mass of assumptions about dissection, body snatching and the anatomy acts. It also helped me understand the roots of some things that are common in the older members my family, such as the obsession with having enough money for your funeral.

An important work about the commodification of the corpse, outlining how the poor were not just the primary victims of burking and body snatching, but after the Anatomy Act was passed, it was their bodies that were taken from workhouses and hospitals for dissection. Commodification of the corpse also includes the funeral industry, and the desperate attempts to avoid a pauper's funeral.

Class-based study of the issues surrounding human dissection in the first half of 19th century Britain. Shows how superstitious fear of dissection was pervasive at all levels of society, but how the criminalisation of poverty of the New Poor Laws enabled the rich to avoid dissection, not only an enormous indignity, but thought to be a possible barrier to heaven..

The book is comprehensive in its coverage of British thought surrounding the topic, but I think a comparison with other European countries would have shed more light—were the poor in France disproportionately subject to dissection? were German protestants as fearful of ascending to heaven with a mutilated body? was dissection used as a criminal punishment in other countries?